Mediatek Going 64-Bit, LTE in 2014

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Mediatek jumped to third place among mobile SoC vendors in the third quarter, and it has vowed to ship chips with 64-bit cores and LTE in 2014 as it makes a bid for markets beyond its stronghold in Asia.

Qualcomm rose to second place (behind Apple) in SoCs for tablets in the quarter in what one market watcher called a "dramatic turn."

The global smartphone applications processor market grew 31% from a year earlier to $4.9 billion, according to a Strategy Analytics report (subscription required).

Qualcomm, Apple, Mediatek, Samsung, and Spreadtrum were the top five revenue earners, capturing 80% of the smartphone SoC market in the quarter. Qualcomm continued to dominate the sector with a 53% revenue share. Mediatek took third place with 10%.

Mohit Bhushan, Mediatek's vice president and general manager of US corporate marketing, told us the company will integrate LTE into its SoCs in 2014. It also will roll out SoCs with 64-ARM cores using ARM's big.little architecture, targeting tablet and handsets. The integration will make Mediatek's chips "very mainstream and ready for the US [and] the European market" as the company aims at higher-end devices.

Finbarr Moynihan, Mediatek's general manager of international sales and marketing, said at a press conference: "Mediatek has been very strong in China, southeast Asia, and doing better in Europe... but our marketshare in the US is still quite small. I think there's opportunity to ship more products, to have our customers ship more products. LTE is a key part of that."

Moynihan predicted that Mediatek will ship more than 200 million SoCs for smartphones by the end of the year. In 2014, it will continue to push its MT6592 octa-core processor internationally, though it will be in phones in Asian markets by yearend.

Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa processor hasn't attained the same success as its previous version. Strategy Analytics said the LTE-integrated chip "can enable Samsung to go after the high-volume mid-range market in 2014 and thus regain some volume share."

Quite right, but simultaneously the demand and affordability of smartphones in Asian market is in increasing curve, and it will continue for next few years, so there is enough vacuum for new competitors and existing both.

What Mediatek has accomplished in this case is to win a solid share of the market in Asia, then move to other geographical areas with time. They are in a pretty good poisiton, but there is no shortage of competitors out there for them to vie against.

Mediatek will be a more successful as compared to the first two giants in Asian markets, as Asian phone market is booming these days and every android phone is shipping with MT chipsets. And these phone is in huge demand as Chinese manufacturers are being able to sale at a very competitive price as compared to Samsung, Apple, HTC and Sony.

It's shaping up to be quite a horserace behind Apple in this market segment. The key is who will ship 64-bit ARM-based SOCs and when. That kind of low-power RISC architecture is paving the way for smaller companies to take aim at the established giants in the processor market.